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It took me quite a while but I’ve got my first Perfect Grade Gundam done. He is pretty impressive! The Perfect Grade Gundam is the white and red one.

To Start with look at the hands on this guy. this is how they were injection molded. It’s pretty wild they can do this!

Above are the perfect grade size weapons.

In the above picture you can see how big he is. The perfect grade is in the middle, master grade is next to him in the middle and real grade on the far left and high grade on the far right. The one sitting on the train in the back is also a high grade model.

This is a master grade with his eyes glowing. He comes with an LED kit so you can light up different parts of him.

The perfect grade also came with a LED kit but his eyes aren’t lighting up very well in this picture.

that’s it for now. I’ve got lots more to post but have been lazy lately.

When I was a kid I would almost always do a lot of tinkering and experimenting this time of year. I had a lot of time off which meant I was bored and needed to figure out things to do. Setting up dominoes downstairs, playing with electronics, and building things was always a lot of fun. When you think of it as a kid thinks a lot of it was building worlds.

These days most of us are lucky to get a day off. This year I had a couple 3 day weekends so I started working on planning out how to make programmed mini RC cars and working on Gundams. This year I got enough Christmas gift money to purchase my first perfect grade Gundam. This thing is massive! It will work out great for a centerpiece and to catch potential customers’ eye at our Hall’s ToyBox stands.

I’ll start with the perfect grade Gundam. This guy is 1/60th scale. Most of the Gundams I build are 1/144 or 1/100 scale so he is quite a bit bigger. He has a few die-cast parts and also LED lighting and lots of detail. So far I only have his feet completed. If I could read Japanese I could maybe tell you how many parts he has. 🙂 I’ll need to learn some.

He’s got lots and lots of parts so should keep me busy for quite some time.

Next are pics of a couple Gundams I built over my break. These are the littler easier and faster to build high grade Gundams that are 1/144 scale.

This one I got for my birthday from my sister last year. It turned out looking quite ausome!This guy above is a high grade Gundam Fenice Rinascita.

This one I really like. I was able to put him together in no time but he has a lot of detail and looks really cool. He is a high grade RGM-96X Jesta E.F.S.F. Special Operations Mobile Suit at 1/144 scale. I really like that you can build these and not need to use paint or glue and they still look great. It makes them lots of fun to put together.

And next the RC project. I have added an Arduino to a bigger RC car and programmed it to do some basic driving but going to the mini and micro level is a whole different thing. If I can use something like an Arduino Micro or something lots littler to run the micro RC cars that would be great. Even better would be making them run off of their battery and solar power. Adding sensors so they can move around on their own autonomously would be great. If you do it right it would almost be like having an eternal running electronic pet. Maybe like a little mouse or big ant but completely on it’s own. Anyway, I picked up a bag of 4 of these little micro AC cars at a secondhand store for a cheap price of $3.00. You can’t beat that for some experimenting robotic fun.

Replacing the circuitry with your own gets to be a challenge on these little platforms. Putting it back together is a very big challenge as well. We’ll see if I get anywhere with this. 🙂

Well my Nvidia GTX 470 died on me. This is the first video card I think I’ve had die on me. It just decided to kick the bucket one afternoon while running idle. I could barely get it to display 16 colors at 640×480 after it had it’s aneurism.

My old GTX 470

The GTX 470 was a good strong card but couldn’t handle some of the new games maxed out anymore. A couple of those games were Call of Duty Ghosts and Dragon Age Inquisition.

I gave in a got me a Nvidia GTX 970. It’s amazing how strong this card is and it’s not even the fastest on the market. For the money it will keep you future proof for a few years pretty easy if you stick to the 1080 resolutions on your computer. The new higher-end video cards are insane powerhouses. They run at multiple teraflops of computing power.

One of these cards easily replaces racks of computers from just a few years ago in computing power comparison. It’s no wonder we can crank out so much CGI magic for movies these days. Just think of rendering servers with even more powerful equivalents to this card running. We are talking 2 to 4 or more of faster versions of these cards cranking away per server. Now just imagine a couple thousand or more of them rendering frame after frame for the latest computer generated scenes and movies. To put this into perspective think of the multimillion dollar Cray supercomputers of times past. Now just realize this, your new video card can compute multitudes faster than the old supercomputers for just $200 to $500. It’s amazing where we are at now for computing power.

My new GTX 970

Here it is lit up

Since my 470 is a paperweight now I decided to take it apart and display the board. I love how this hardware is engineered and how it looks. Also, if you’re into salvaging the heat sinks are copper and aluminum a lot of the time and there is a good amount of weight to them so if you get enough of them you should be able to get some descent money out of them. Below is the GTX 470 dissection.

I’m a big Lamborghini fan and pick up Lamborghini stuff whenever I can. I’ve been acquiring Lamborghini stuff since I was a kid. Recently I’ve had a lot of interest in vintage and antique things. Anyway, my friend found me this Bluetank motorized Lamborghini model from some time ago. I’m not sure how old it is but it is an older model that may be harder to find. I’ll have to see if he can help me figure out when it was made. Its part number is TK-8802 and is 1/28 scale. I’m not sure what it is worth but thought I would post some pictures to share.

My friend has a great online toy store to check out if you’re interested. It’s www.hallstoybox.com. He has all sorts of vintage toys to check out. If you have any questions about toys he’s the person to ask. He has a contact page on his site to ask him anything toy related you’d like.

Here are some photos of AG (Advanced Grade) Gundams. They aren’t what they seem. Advanced grade is the basic most simple Gundam model as far as I know and consists of 50 or less total parts. These are super simple compared to High Grade which can be a couple hundred parts to Master Grade which can be hundreds of parts to Perfect Grade which may be over 1000 parts.

These Gundams also work with an arcade game that is most likely only in Japan. You set your Gundam on a spot on the arcade game and he loads into the game as far as I know.

My wife and I each built one. She modified hers and made her gun silver and also painted the visor and another part of the front of the Gundam. Hers looks pretty cool, it’s the blue one.

Above is the gun that she made metal with metal tape.

Above you can see the paint she added. I think it’s actually fingernail polish.

Yep, that’s it’s name. Naming on some of this stuff gets crazy.
This is a HG Universal Century model and the second Gundam I built.

This one wasn’t too hard and it’s also transformable which I thought would be cool. I soon realized though that this one doesn’t transform like a Transformer. You actually have to take apart the Gundam into many parts and add other parts to get it to convert into the spaceship thing. So I won’t be transforming it very often. This one also has some limiting hands so I can’t equip the weapons in either hand if I want. The gun anyway is limited to the right hand. Beyond that the Delta Plus prototype looks pretty cool. Lots of pictures below.

That’s it for this Gundam. I’ve got lots more to post so please stop back.

One day when I was out hunting for toys and things at some second hand stores I came by a bag of model parts. That night I dumped out the bag and started putting those parts together. The parts ended up being about 3 different Gundam models. I later gave the bag of parts to my friend to see if he wanted to sell them at his Hallstoybox.com business. After I gave the 3 models away I kept thinking about how much fun it was just trying to get those models together. I was lucky because he gave me the pile of Gundam parts back. Below are the first Gundams I put together from the pile of parts.

I then decided to buy me a model to see how a complete one goes together. I got me this Gundam X MAOH off of amazon.com

These models are snap together models but they are very detailed and far beyond what I would put together for snap models when I was a kid. You don’t need to do any painting with them either since the parts are made of different color plastic. The models are very intricate and fully poseable. Many of them come with different weapons and different configurations. This model for example came with two swords and three different guns.

I took my time putting this one together and I think it was maybe a 10 hour build. There are many different grades of these models. This model is a HG or High Grade model which is one of the more common grade models you will find. There is a grade I know of below this which is AG or Advanced Grade which can be put together in an hour or less. Then there are grades above HG which are MG for Master Grade and PG for Perfect Grade. Prices for all the models can range from $10.00 to over $300.00 for the Perfect Grade models.

Here is the list of model grades ranging from easiest on the left to hardest on the right.

AG HG MG PG
Advanced Grade, High Grade, Master Grade, Perfect Grade

If you like building things and especially are into robots these models are a lot of fun. They can be purchased at a lot of hobby stores, online at places like amazon.com and stores that specialize in Gundams and even at Barnes & Noble.

Below are some pictures of my Gundam X MAOH. I will be posting on my other Gundams I’m working on so please stop back.

My Friend has recently started a collectable toy business specializing in Transformers, Masters of the Universe and G.I. Joe toys.

I’m currently helping him get some content on his website. He will be posting some more toys for sale soon. These are the toys we grew up with when we were kids. They are still very cool and hold a lot of sentimental value with a lot of people. Below are some pictures of some of the toys he will be selling. Please check his website www.hallstoybox.com frequently to see what’s up for sale.